Mana
by Stonega
Summary: AU in which Miki Sanada became a sentient shadow before the start of the game and meets S.E.E.S in Tartarus.


**NOTE: I normally write in past-tense (ex: "said" vs "says") but I wanted to try something with present tense. This and one other story I'm going to start which will be in past-tense and my usual style will be practice stories before I really commit to a story.**

* * *

In the furthest corner of the room, a girl hugs herself tightly. She rocks back and forth, sniffing and fighting back tears. The pain dies down to a mild sizzling sensation on her ghostly white skin. She closes her eyes and thinks of better times while absentmindedly scratching at the metal collar around her neck.

"Brother," the girl whispers. With a sigh, she falls back onto the thin mattress in her cell and stares up at the ceiling.

The room is mostly bare. Other than her bed, there's a toilet she no longer needs, and that's all. No table or chairs, no toys, and the only window is tinted black. Whoever is behind it never speaks to her, and breaking it is impossible with her power regulated by the collar on her neck. To even try results in a painful shock that leaves her gasping on the ground and tingling down to her fingers and toes.

With a whir, the door at the other end of the room opens. The girl perks up and stares into the dark corridor beyond her cell.

"Food?" she wonders aloud.

A black hand reaches through the darkness and slaps at the floor, pulling itself forward along the ground and into her room. The dark mass of goop dawns a colorful red mask; gleaming yellow eyes stare back at her. The creature lets out a low, guttural cry and attacks.

Hunger stabs at the girl's chest. She springs from her bed and launches herself at the creature. She pierces into its mucky body with her bare hand and lets an ethereal force flow into the beast. It cries out in agony before the energy coursing through its body causes its mask to shatter and its otherworldly body to liquidate. Before the being fully evaporates, the girl plunges both hands into the teeming black liquid, then into her mouth to feed on whatever she can.

Once the creature is gone, the girl collapses onto her knees and stares at her dirtied hands and white gown. Thick bile slides down her throat and into her stomach. It's both satisfying and disgusting.

The girl weeps. _Your name is Mana now_, she remembers. Her life as Miki is over.

"I'll kill that Kirijo man," she swears.

* * *

Mana's life consists of three rooms: the sleeping room, the testing room, and the fighting room. On a morning like any other, she is led into the testing room by the usual men in white. One of them, an older balding man with glasses gestures for her to stand in the middle of the area. By now she knows to do as told without hesitation, lest she risk both a shock and the wrath of one of the cruel men.

"Turn to the left," says the youngest of the men, lean and with slick backed dark hair. Again, she does as instructed. She turns and stares into a large square mirror staged against the wall.

It's hard to say how many months or years it's been since she's seen herself on a reflective surface. Her environment is always carefully controlled by the men in white. From her own inspections, she knows her skin is much paler than it used to be. Her body is covered in scars, and her fingers and toes are more like claws now. One time a Shadow cut her, and in place of red blood like in that memory of falling on the cement and scraping her knees, there was a black liquid that was a little bit thicker. It's different than blood, but also different than what comes out of the Shadows.

But today she sees herself.

Near as she can tell, she hasn't grown in size or in bulk. Her skin is white, her hands are claws, that much she already knows. Her skin is as white as snow, yes, but so are her lips. She feels them with a finger—they still feel the same, just look different. She opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue. There is only a hint of pink or red in either. And her eyes are almost the same vibrant yellow she sees in the Shadows.

One of the men in white is standing behind her with a clipboard in hand. He is an older man too, full of wrinkles and with curly salt and pepper hair. He's always the nicest of them all.

"What is your name?" he asks gently.

She continues staring at her reflection.

"Your name?" he asks again.

"Mana," she answers.

"And what are you?"

She wavers. Then, "I don't know,"

The man scribbles something down, then looks at her again. "Are you a human? Or are you a shadow?"

"A shadow," Mana says hesitantly. She lifts her hand to her face and scratches at the skin. A thin line opens, drawing blood or shadow muck or whatever it is. The small bits of black liquid streak down her cheek. Steam hisses from her wound and it closes in seconds. Mana's expression hardens. "I'm a shadow," she says more certainly.

The man smiles warmly. "Good. You're doing well. I just have a few more questions for you. You don't have to look at the mirror anymore if you don't want to."

Mana turns slowly and looks at the kindly man, but when they lock eyes she remembers her reflection. She looks down at the floor instead.

"Mana," the man goes on, "what can you tell me about the power of Persona?"

She frowns. The word isn't familiar, but thoughts string themselves together.

Shadows and Persona are flip sides of the same coin. A persona is the power of one's psyche. Once evoked, it can summon special powers. Those powers are usually destructive, but they are broader than just that. An Evoker is needed to summon a persona.

Mana opens her eyes and explains repeats those words aloud. She glances at the man's face watches her smile grow. He writes something down.

"That's correct. I bet you're surprised you knew that? You ate a Shadow recently that used to be one of our researchers. An unfortunate accident turned him. As we expected, you've progressed to the point that you can absorb some of the knowledge of a Shadow that was once human." says the man. "Before I ask you anything else, why don't you ask me something? That's only fair, right?"

Mana bites her lip. "Will I be able to go home one day?"

"Of course! Our tests are to see the utmost limits of human to shadow transmogrification. But we also want to see the reverse, turning a fully developed shadow back into a human. I know it's hard, but if you just hang in there, I promise that one day we'll make you like you were and you can go home."

Metal clatters in the background as of the other men grabs several long chains, two glowing spheres, and vial of black liquid connected to a hose.

Mana fingers the color on her neck.

One day she will get to go home. But not before killing that Kirijo man.

Days and weeks bleed together and life becomes a haze of sadness and despair.

* * *

An explosion rouses her from her sleep. She rushes to her feet, expecting the door to open and another meal to enter. The floor rumbles as another explosion reverberates.

"Hello?!" Mana shouts to the tinted window.

The collar at her neck lets out a high pitched beeping sound. Mana winces and curls into the fetal position on the floor, expecting a shock. With a click, the collar expands to more twice it's size. Mana's eyes go wide. After a moment of realization, she pulls the ring off of her neck and hurls it across the room. It strikes the wall with a thud, then clatters around on the floor. She stares at it in disbelief. Her fingers touch her neck. Nothing is there.

"Kirijo Man," Mana whispers. Something feral takes hold.

Mana rises to her feet and extends an arm towards the tinted black window. A chain bores through the flesh on her forearm and extends outward, shattering the glass she once dared not break. She leaps through into the other room; it's dark, full of chairs and computers, and no one is in sight. She scans the room and finds a metal door. Magic gathers through her body, flows through her veins and along her body, and with the energy formed she conjures up blades of wind and releases a Garu spell that shears the door into pieces. Mana taps her foot to the ground and launches through the air, through the awkward gap her spell had created.

Fire erupts from a window and door at the end of the hallway. Men and women scream and scramble. One of them trips onto the floor and rolls about to try and douse the flames.

"You're the mean old man!" Mana shouts at him. Through his rolling, the man looks up and catches a glimpse of her before he too is sheared into pieces.

Mana speeds past the bloody pile she made, through the chaos and carnage, with nothing but revenge on her mind. As men and women try to run past, she flails her chains about at anything in her path that moves. She bats a chain at one man and splits his head open. She launches a chain through one woman's chest and clean through the other side before whipping her out a nearby window.

"Where is the Kirijo man?!" Mana demands.

Her eyes stop on a frail woman in a white coat clutching at her long braid of brown hair.

"Top," she mutters, and points shakily at the ceiling.

Wind gathers at Mana's hands and instead of taking the form of blades of wind, they gather into a single point and rotate heavily, becoming a drill The modified Garu spell shoots skyward, piercing through floors. Cement, tile, debris, and bits of blood from one unfortunate enough to be in the spell's wake rain downward. Mana leaps to the side to avoid the downfall and shields her eyes with the sleeves of her cloak until the dust settles.

Each jump carries her one floor up, until her next spell opens up a hole to the sky. Mana pauses for a moment to gaze through the hole and admire the sight of the stars and the faint feel of a breeze before she turns her attention back to the matter at hand.

A Garu spell here rips open a wall. A Megido spell disintegrates a door and most of the man that had his ear pressed against it on the other side. One woman screams, and after a chain-shot in the general direction of the sound, Mana feels some resistance. She changes the direction of the chain, wrapping it around whatever she hit, then draws it towards her. The woman tries to plant her feet on the floor and resist in vain. When the woman is close enough to touch, Mana leans in towards the woman's ear.

"Tell me where the-"

Before she finishes, the world goes dark.

* * *

When she wakes, the Shadows are everywhere. They trudge along a tiled floor, a floor that is different from the building she had been in. But that's all the Shadows do.

In the past, whenever Mana met a Shadow it was a fight for survival. Here, the creatures either don't notice her or don't care about her.

Mana picks herself up from off the floor and dusts off her cloak. Her new surrounding are stranger than any she'd seen before. Deep green pillars are set along the floor in seemingly random places, alongside desks, and haphazard inclines and dips in the terrain. Blood seeps from the crevices of the ceiling and stains portions of the ground. Chests, boxes, odd morsels and gems are strewn about, and many Shadows the likes of which Mana has never seen roam the area. An avian shadow with a red mask soars overhead, and a white glove with a little black head skitters about in the distance. The usual Maya variants of the shadow, which are little more than sludge with hands and a mask, are lurking about too, but in larger numbers.

Mana hugs herself. She'd fought Shadows before, but if they all turned on at once, it could be bad. She's never fought these types before. Best to tread lightly.

As Mana wanders, she thinks back to the building she had been in and how close she was to finding the Kirijo Man. He was supposed to be the top floor according to that lady, and the top floor made sense given that he was supposed to be the leader, but then it went dark and everything changed. Thinking back, she did kill a lot of people that had been moving without looking at them. Could one of those have been the Kirijo Man? But that didn't make sense, because she expected to find him waiting for her in a large room, and then there would be an epic battle because he injects himself with some weird shadow serum, but then after remembering what she had lost because of him, she would summon up some kind of new hidden power and triumph.

A golden stand set in the flooring around another corner catches Mana's eye. She approaches slowly. Light green wisps sift into the air and disappear. She tilts her head to the side and reach towards the strange light, but pulls back at the last second.

A flying Shadow caws nearby and curiosity gets the better of her. Mana plucks the bird out of the air on her chains and slaps it onto the panel before it can resist. Light envelops the creature and it disappears from sight.

"That doesn't help," Mana says to herself, "is it going somewhere good, or somewhere bad? Or is it just...dying?"

She errs on the side of caution and disregards the strange space.

After further wandering, Mana notes that there are stairs up, but no where on this floor are there stairs down. She tries blasting a hole through a wall, only to be met with the strange sight of pillars and objects floating in a seemingly infinite space beyond. The sight only lasts for a few seconds before the walls grow back as though organic. The floors and ceilings are different; the gap shows a space that was a floor up or down, and the span of time it takes to grow back is enough for her to slip through. The distance she falls is not insignificant, but she makes the landing smoothly and without issue. A human is likely to break bones with such a drop. She signs. Another reminder of what she is now.

Five or six floors down, everything goes dark again. After seconds of a loud grinding sound, she sees again. The layout of the floor is different, though still seemingly random. A narrow hallway with an unopened box at the end is replaced with a large room with another one of those glowing squares in it. Mana turns her nose at it and continues burrowing her way downward.

Her working theory at this point is that after she lost consciousness, she was moved somewhere else. The solution was obviously to escape this Shadow den and find the Kirijo man.

_Then what_, she wonders. She stops and suddenly feels very tired. She remembers a narrow space she found on this floor and retraces her steps. When she finds it, she hugs herself as tightly as she can into the small nook in one of the rooms and closes her eyes. _Everything will be okay if I just sleep._

The hunger is too much when she wakes, and she forgets herself. Somewhere in the mishmash of images, she sees herself ripping into one of those glove shadows and eating its delicious foul goop. And then one of those birds. And then a few of the Maya's that try to swarm her after. She eats until she has her fill and then falls to her knees until she regains her composure. Amidst her thoughtless time, when her body moves on auto-pilot, faint memories streak past her.

_Her brother, with a fresh cut on his cheek, insists he is fine. She fetches a band-aid from the House-Mother's cupboard and puts it on his cheek. He blushes and looks away, insisting she's making a big deal out of nothing. She smiles. Later that night, amidst the flames, she's pulled away by men in black._

When Mana regains her senses, she finds she's continuously blasting at a floor which won't yield. The ground ground cracks and breaks, but never goes completely through, and repairs too quickly for her to find out if it ever will.

This is the first floor, she realizes. It's different. Still tiled, but no blood. Still strange, but the atmosphere isn't as dark and mentally draining. And there are no Shadows.

"A door," she says. She spots a large double-set of doors at the other end of the room. Surveying the room, she finds a set of stairs leading into the face of a large golden disc, a mechanism like the glowing square but a little different, and a grandfather clock that simmers bright yellow. Her eyes move back to the door.

Should she find the Kirjo man? Or look for Brother first?

She remembers all the people that have died at her hands. Her chest feels heavy and she bites her lip.

"Brother, please still love me. I'll do anything."

Mana sits on a stair, buries her head into her clawed hands, and allows herself a moment to cry.

The world is a different place outside of the strange tower. The sky is green, the moon is huge and bright, and coffins and blood fill the streets.

When Mana emerges from the tower, she doesn't know what to make of the imagery. Is this hell? Did she die and go there?

Her steps are slow as she searches for something familiar. She sees signs. Some of the words are big, but some of the Shadows she ate before have read those words before. After a few minutes, she puts all of the street names together and realizes that she is on Port Island, a man made island connected to Iwatodai.

_Nothing works,_ she thinks. Street lights are off, TV's in windows are off, and cars are frozen in place in the streets with miniature oddly-shaped coffins stuffed inside. The only light comes from the moon, and the bizarre green hue the lingers in the air.

"Did the world end?" Mana says with a deep sigh. Her thoughts turn to her Brother once more.

As she drifts pass another coffin, she's caught by a whim and jabs both claws into it. She rips it open, and the coffin breaks into splinters that hit the street and fade into nothingness. A black mist from the casket lets out a scream that sounds like an adult man and pools together on the ground, turning from a gas to a liquid and finally solidifying into a Cowardly Maya.

Mana recognizes the shape and mask. Cowardly Maya's are among those that crawl along the ground. They wear light blue masks and are the weakest shadows around. Mana frowns at the creature and tears it to shreds with a single swipe of her claw. _Are there Shadows in all of these coffins_, she wonders.

Suddenly she's stricken by compulsion. She turns back to the strange tower she came from. Something about it calls to her. She needs to go back there. There is something important to do there. Everyone is gone. The world must have ended.


End file.
